Former Pope Benedict XVI's Anti-Gay Lies Continue

Picture of then Pope Benedict XVI with his "personal secretary".

Former Pope Benedict XVI - thought by many to be a self-loathing closeted gay with a long time male lover - has again launched a major attack on gays and also the 1960's sexual revolution and Vatican II for the rampant and global sexual abuse of children and youths by Catholic clergy.  He conveniently ignores the reality that in the 1950's and likely long, long before then, sexual abuse was rampant within the priesthood, so blaming the 1960's sexual revolution for something that long proceeded it is specious at best.  He also side steps his own role in cover ups as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - historical also known as the Inquisition - while serving under John Paul II who protected some of the worse predator clergy.  Moreover, it was Benedict who enforced the Church's warped 12th century dogma on human sexuality that many experts credit with the psycho-sexual maladjustment of predator priests that along with unquestioned power set the stage for abuse.  The take away about Benedict's creed is to believe none of it.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post on Benedict's attempt to avoid his own responsibility in the abuse scandal and the corrupt nature of the Church hierarchy:

Breaking years of silence on major church affairs, Pope Benedict XVI has written a lengthy letter devoted to clerical sex abuse in which he attributes the crisis to a breakdown of church and societal moral teaching and says he felt compelled to assist “in this difficult hour.”

The 6,000-word letter, published in tandem Thursday by a Catholic outlet and an Italian newspaper, decries the 1960s sexual revolution, laments the secularization of the West and describes seminaries filled with “homosexual cliques.”

Benedict’s personal secretary, Archbishop Georg Gänswein [thought by many to be Benedict’s gay lover], confirmed the authenticity of the letter in an email.

Since abdicating the papacy six years ago, Benedict — living in a monastery inside the Vatican City walls — had remained nearly silent on issues facing the Roman Catholic Church, in part to yield full authority to his successor, Pope Francis. The new letter, then, marks an unprecedented moment in the modern church: a significant pronouncement from an ex-pope on the most central problem facing the church.
 Benedict wrote that he contacted both Francis and the Vatican’s secretary of state before proceeding. And the pope emeritus finished his essay by thanking Francis for his work to show “the light of God.” But Benedict’s remarks on the topic differ sharply from those of Francis, who has emphasized the corrupted power of clergy and has acknowledged systemic problems that result in coverup. Those themes also prevailed during a February sexual abuse summit at the Vatican that involved leading bishops from around the world.
 Benedict devoted the first third of his letter to changes in society and inside the church beginning in the 1960s that gave rise to an “all-out sexual freedom.” He wrote that Catholic moral theology “suffered a collapse” of its own during a period of major reforms.  One outcome of the sexual revolution, Benedict wrote, is that “pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.”

David Gibson, the director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture, said it was a “major problem” that Benedict was “blaming the abuse crisis on liberal mores and gays and secularization.”
 In the letter, Benedict did not describe his own role in dealing with the crisis, nor did he discuss particular cases. Benedict, before becoming pope, was the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. As pope, he sometimes defrocked hundreds of priests per year, and the Vatican was more forthcoming than it is now about releasing data on abuse.

But analysts say Benedict also had significant shortcomings and was slow to acknowledge the institutional problems that have enabled abuse to persist — including the role of bishops and cardinals in protecting accused priests.

Benedict remains a sick and twisted individual.

The Vatican's Continued Refusal to Address Sex Abuse

I was beginning my "coming out" saga in 2002 when the Catholic Church sex abuse exploded in Boston.  The expose on the moral bankruptcy of the Church leadership - which traced all the way to the Vatican - made it much easier to (i) walk away from Catholicism, and (ii) rejecting all of the Church's anti-gay brainwashing that I had experienced growing up Catholic.  Sixteen years later, I have come to terms with my sexual orientation and now count as friends many members of the LGBT community who are more moral and decent than the bitter old men at the Vatican.  Meanwhile, the Catholic Church remains embroiled in one new sex abuse scandal after another.  More importantly, no thorough house cleaning of bishops and cardinals who aided, abetted, or participated in sexual abuse has occurred.  Worse yet, there are no signs that this will occur any time soon. Continued cover-ups and obfuscation remain the norm as entrenched Vatican bureaucracies resist any meaningful change and the Church clings to its 12th century dogma on human sexuality and priestly celibacy that, in my view, play a causative role in the rampant clerical sex abuse. A piece in the Washington Post looks at the Church's continued failure to :clean house" and end the cycle of abuse.  Here are highlights:

With revelation after revelation, a new wave of sexual abuse scandals is rocking the Roman Catholic Church and presenting Pope Francis with the greatest crisis of his papacy.

In Chile, prosecutors have raided church offices, seized documents and accused leaders of a coverup. In Australia, top church figures are facing detention and trials. And in the United States, after the resignation of a cardinal, questions are swirling about a hierarchy that looked the other way and protected him for years.

The church has had more than three decades — since notable abuse cases first became public — to safeguard victims, and itself, against such system failures. And, in the past five years, many Catholics have looked to Francis as a figure who could modernize the church and help it regain its credibility.

But Francis’s track record in handling abuse is mixed, . . . . Analysts who have studied the church’s response to sexual abuse, and several people who have advised the pope, say the Vatican has been unable to take the dramatic steps that can help an organization get out from under scandals — and avoid their repetition.

 

Francis is credited with some meaningful moves. Last month, he accepted the highest-level resignation to date when Theodore McCarrick stepped down from the College of Cardinals. . . . But the pope has also had notable missteps. During a January trip to South America, he drew widespread criticism by saying he was convinced of the innocence of Bishop Juan Barros , accused of covering up the acts of a notorious abuser.

 

Francis sought to recover from that episode by sending two investigators to Chile, apologizing for his “serious errors” in handling the crisis . . . . He also called Chile’s 34 bishops to Rome, where, according to a letter that was leaked to the Chilean media, he accused them of failing to investigate possible crimes and destroying evidence. The bishops offered to step down en masse. So far, Francis has accepted five of those resignations.

 

Yet the church has struggled with a more comprehensive effort to close the chapter on sexual abuse.  Whereas transparency is typically advised, the church remains quiet about its investigations and disciplinary procedures. It does not release any data on the inquiries it has carried out. A proposed tribunal for judging bishops accused of negligence or coverup was quashed by the Vatican department that was supposed to help implement it. And, rather than being fired and publicly admonished, offending church leaders are typically allowed to resign without explanation.

Even when the Vatican does take action, resolution comes “at a very glacial pace,” said Juan Carlos Cruz, who was among the Chilean abuse victims who met for several days with Francis this past spring.

Cruz said he tried to tell the pope bluntly that a deeper shake-up was still needed. He specifically mentioned Francisco Javier ­Errázuriz, a member of the pope’s powerful nine-member advisory Council of Cardinals, who victims have long said ignored their abuse accusations and tried to discredit them. Errázuriz has denied wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, in the wider world, the cultural ground is shifting, and other forces are taking the lead on accountability.

 

At the same time, law enforcement agencies have been pursuing abuse cases in countries that once treated the church with deference. In Australia, some state and territory governments are even going after one of the church’s most sacred tenets and are on the verge of enforcing new laws requiring priests to report child abuse that they learn of during confessions. In the United States, the Catholic Church is bracing for the release of a 900-page grand jury report into sex crimes across six dioceses in Pennsylvania.

 

“I think we have reached a point where bishops alone investigating bishops is not the answer,” said Bishop Edward Scharfenberger, of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany. “We bishops want to rise to this challenge, which may well be our last opportunity considering all that has happened.”

 

A similar conversation, about how to strengthen the response to abuse, has played out for several years in the Vatican — particularly within the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors, which Francis created a year after he became pope. But little has come of the commission’s ideas.

In 2015, Francis approved its proposal of a tribunal, placed within the Vatican’s powerful doctrine office, that would assess cases of bishops accused of concealing or neglecting abuse. The tribunal, though, was never created. Four former members of the commission, as well as outside analysts, say the idea was thwarted by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. . . .  congregation members and others in the Vatican hierarchy were also concerned about opening a “Pandora’s box.”

 

“This would mean hundreds of cases that would then bounce back to Rome with a huge media impact,” said Politi, author “Pope Francis Among the Wolves,” a papal biography. “It would signify the beginning of hunting season on culprits.”

 

The stalled effort to launch the tribunal prompted the resignation from the commission of Marie Collins, an Irish abuse survivor. Current and former members of the commission said that they are not given data and information on abuse-related cases being handled by the Vatican. Krysten Winter-Green, a former commission member who was a longtime counselor for abuse victims, said they were up against a “domain of secrecy.”

“The crime in the Catholic Church remains causing scandal, not covering up,” said Anne Barrett Doyle, co-director of the site BishopAccountability.org, which tracks sexual abuse cases. “Bishops all over the world are not being forthcoming.”

Sadly, a worldwide conspiracy continues aimed at covering up crimes and protecting those who aided and abetted the predators who raped children and youths. It's little wonder that Church membership is falling in educated areas of the world.

New Catholic Church Scandal Brewing Over Abuse Cover Up

Cardinal Gerhard Muller - guilty of systematic sexual abuse cover up?

With the Academy Awards in less than three weeks and the movie Spotlight up for best picture (if you have not seen the movie, it is a MUST see), the last thing the Roman Catholic Church needs is yet more high profile sex abuse cover up news stories.  But that seems to be what may be about to burst loose with Cardinal Gerhard Müller (pictured above), the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a/k/a, the Inquisition, implicated in the systematic cover up of sexual abuse of children and youths while he was bishop of Regensburg.  Pope Francis gives mealy mouthed apologies yet this will be another cardinal who has faced no discipline for his misdeeds and suffered no consequences.  Religion Dispatches looks at this brewing bombshell.  Here are excerpts:

Fast on the heels of the news that a Bavarian boys choir directed by Pope Benedict’s brother was a hotbed of physical and sexual abuse for decades, comes the allegation that Cardinal Gerhard Müller covered up the abuse when he was the bishop of Regensburg.

According to the National Catholic Reporter, the allegation is being made by the former head of the lay diocesan council in Regensburg, Germany, who said that Müller and a deputy “systematically” covered up the abuse, disbanded the diocesan council to thwart outside investigation, and installed at least one known abuser priest in a parish who then committed more acts of abuse.

Müller has served as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the second most powerful position in the Vatican, since 2012 and has emerged as one of the most outspoken opponents of Pope Francis’ efforts to modernize church practices around marriage and divorce and the treatment of gay Catholics.

He also oversaw the disciplining of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR) for its supposed disobedience to the Vatican and was widely criticized for the public dressing down he gave the nuns in 2014.

If the allegations hold up, Müller will be the third prefect of the CDF to be accused of turning a blind eye to reports of sexual abuse. Benedict has been accused of allowing serial abuser Father Marcial Maciel to hold an exalted position in the church for decades while he was prefect of the CDF despite credible charges of abuse.

Cardinal William Joseph Levada, who held the position after Benedict, came under fire for how he handled charges of abuse when he was the bishop of Portland and San Francisco. Like Benedict, who was given a report on Maciel that he disregarded, Levada reportedly received a brief in the mid-1980s from a three-priest panel on the brewing U.S. abuse scandal that he ignored.

And like Müller, who said in 2012 that responsibility for sexual abuse lay only with the perpetrators, Levada denied that bishops had “aided and abetted” abuse by failing to remove abusers or moving them from parish to parish. Eventually, the diocese of Portland that Levada headed for nearly a decade was the first to declare bankruptcy because of the magnitude of abuse suits it had to settle.

What does it mean for the church that the last three heads of the CDF have been implicated in covering up sexual abuse at a time when Pope Francis has promised transparency on the issue? 


And what does it mean for the sex-related doctrine guarded so ferociously by the CDF, doctrine on everything from birth control to women priests to marriage, that  has been overseen for the past 35 years by a succession of men whose vigorous defense of doctrinal orthodoxy may be directly proportionate to their need to deny the reality of sexual deviance within the church?

Vatileaks: Vatican Properties Used as Brothels and Massage Parlours for Priests

Last month the bitter old men at the so-called Synod on the Family at the Vatican voted to maintain the Church's anti-gay and anti-woman.  Now, perhaps in retaliation or to merely humiliate the  corrupt and homophobic Roman Curia, a purported mole in the Vatican has leaked information suggesting that numerous Vatican owned properties in Rome are being used as brothels and massage parlors frequented by Catholic priests.   A piece in The Independent looks at this latest scandal and again notes that the Vatican owns the property that is home to Europe's largest gay sauna.  Equally delicious are reports that the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, a/k/a The Inquisition, is involved  with some of the properties.  Here are highlights:

Vatican-owned properties in Rome are operating as seedy saunas and massage parlours where priests pay for sex, according to the latest in a series of leaked reports to embarrass the Church.

It is also claimed that Vatican officials are allowing buildings to be rented out at peppercorn rents as favours to powerful colleagues and turning a blind eye to shady property deals, as well as allowing addresses to be used as red-light establishments.

Among the properties mentioned in the document, made public by a Vatican mole, are premises in two streets close to the Italian Parliament and a solarium near Piazza Barberini, according to press reports.

One particular Vatican department, the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, has been highlighted in the list. It owns hundreds of high-value properties in central Rome, worth hundreds of millions of euros.

Two years ago it emerged the Vatican had purchased a €23m (£16m) share of a Rome apartment block, 2 Via Carducci, which housed the Europa Multiclub, Europe’s biggest gay sauna. Tales of visiting priests were legion, and a section of the sauna’s website promoting special “bear nights” included a video of a hirsute man stripping down and changing into a priest’s outfit.

Meanwhile, sources quoted by Ansa news agency said that Pope Francis hoped to close the leak investigation and draw a line under the affair before the Vatican’s special Jubilee Year, which begins on 8 December. Some observers believe the leaks are part of a campaign to undermine his effort to reform the Curia.

One senior figure, Monsignor Lucio Vallejo Balda, and another official have been arrested by Vatican police over the leaks, while it has emerged that four cardinals have also been questioned.

Why do I find the word "hypocrites"  on my lips? 

Right Wing Freaks Out Over Obama's Prayer Breakfast Remarks

Hate merchant Bill Donohue

Personally, I find it obscene and offensive that presidents and members of Congress continue to attend the so-called National Prayer Breakfast which is sponsored each year by Christofascist extremists.  The organizers' goal is to turn the U.S. Constitution upside down and make their perverted form of Christianity the de facto national religion.  That said, it has been fun to watch the flying sheets of spittle after Obama rightly remarked that it was necessary to overcome the horrors and perversions that religion has all too often been used to justify.  Anyone with an accurate knowledge of history knows that Christianity has much blood on its hands.  And for a compilation of some of the murders conducted in the name of Christianity done by burning victims, check out Bob Felton's post here.  It makes ISIS' burning of a Jordanian pilot look tame.  Crooks and Liars looks at the right wing melt down over Obama's simple statements of fact.  Here are highlights:

President Obama spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast, where he discussed freedom of expression along with highlighting the many acts of barbarism that are happening now and have happened throughout the centuries which were justified under the guise of religion. He also explained in depth about how as Christians, we can overcome these perversions of religion. President Obama spoke for about thirty minutes and used almost three thousand words today, but the only part of the speech the right wing media is focusing on is when he brought up the Crusades.

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. Michelle and I returned from India -- an incredible, beautiful country, full of magnificent diversity -- but a place where, in past years, religious faiths of all types have, on occasion, been targeted by other peoples of faith, simply due to their heritage and their beliefs -- acts of intolerance that would have shocked Gandhiji, the person who helped to liberate that nation.

How dare the president put into context the historical atrocities performed over centuries in the name of God! As usual the Catholic League's Bill Donohue took front and center stage on Fox News and was fuming because Obama dared to mention Christ and demanded that he apologize. Neil Cavuto actually defended Obama for the most part which kind of surprised me, but Donohue, the pedophile priest apologist didn't. 

What Donohue is actually demanding is to be the president's speech writer/approval monitor. Bill has no problem with the speech except when Obama mentions acts of brutality perpetrated by Christians and Catholics. He immediately tries to rewrite history and said that the atrocities happening name in the name of Islam far outweigh anything that happened in the history of the world.

More of Obama's speech, which appears to make Donohue's whining completely unfounded.

But we also see faith being twisted and distorted, used as a wedge -- or, worse, sometimes used as a weapon. From a school in Pakistan to the streets of Paris, we have seen violence and terror perpetrated by those who profess to stand up for faith, their faith, professed to stand up for Islam, but, in fact, are betraying it. We see ISIL, a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism -- terrorizing religious minorities like the Yezidis, subjecting women to rape as a weapon of war, and claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions.

The real truth is that a world free of religion would likely be a kinder, less violent place where much suffering inflicted by the "godly" and "pious" would no longer occur. 

Apologists for Religion are the Problem

Bill Maher, Reza Aslan, Richard Dawkins (Credit: HBO/Malin Fezehai/AP/Akira Suemori)

Throughout history religion has unleashed untold hate, misery and bloodshed.   Yes, some religious groups engage in charitable works, but even then many engage in proselytizing at the same time.  It's always about winning others over to their belief systems and often punishing those who don't yield - e.g., the Salvation Army's anti-gay policies and past rejection of gays needing shelter.  Meanwhile, we see ISIS demonstrating just how evil fundamentalist religion can be even as anti-Muslim Christians forget Christianity's own ugly past that has included the Inquisition, the extermination of the Cathars in France and many other acts of genocide against those deemed to hold heretical beliefs.  Yet despite this horrible track record we still see apologist defending religion, including Reza Aslan whose book (which I read) calls into question some of the main manufactured storyline of the Christian construct of Christ.  A lengthy piece in Salon looks at the refusal of apologists to open their eyes.  Here are excerpts:

Bill Maher’s recent monologue on “Real Time” about the failure of liberals to speak out about the routine atrocities and violations of human rights carried out in the name of religion in the Muslim world has unleashed a torrent of commentary, much of it from progressives advocating more, not less, tolerance of Islam.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who sided with Ben Affleck against Maher in a follow-up segment a few days later, calls ISIS rebels, in an op-ed, “barbarians” who “give all Islam a bad name,” and asks us to take into account the religion’s diversity, lest we slip into “Islamophobic bigotry.” Fareed Zakaria, in his Washington Post column, cautions us to recall that Islam, Christianity and Judaism once peacefully coexisted, but acknowledges that Islam suffers from a “cancer” – extremism that incites acts of terrorism. This he views, though, as a problem of “Islam today.”

One pundit in particular, though, has busied himself opining on Maher and nonbelievers in general — Reza Aslan, Islam’s most prominent apologist of late. Delivered via multiple media outlets, his remarks, brimming with condescension, tinged with arrogance and laden with implicit insults to thinking people, deserve special scrutiny for one main reason: among well-intentioned liberals who don’t know much about religion, his words carry weight.

Aslan accuses the benighted critics of religion of a far more grievous misapprehension: the assumption that words mean what they actually mean. Here I’ll quote him at length.

“It is a fallacy to believe that people of faith derive their values primarily from their Scriptures. The opposite is true. People of faith insert their values into their scriptures, reading them through the lens of their own cultural, ethnic, nationalistic and even political perspectives. . . .  After all, scripture is meaningless without interpretation.

 Aslan is essentially taking a postmodernist, Derrida-esque scalpel to “scripture” and eviscerating it of objective content. This might pass muster in the college classroom these days, but what of all those ISIS warriors unschooled in French semiotic analysis who take their holy book’s admonition to do violence literally? As they rampage and behead their way through Syria and Iraq, ISIS fighters know they have the Koran on their side – a book they believe to be inerrant and immutable, the final Word of God, and not at all “malleable.” Their holy book backs up jihad, suicide attacks (“martyrdom”), beheadings, even taking captive women as sex slaves.

Moreover, the razor-happy butchers of little girls’ clitorises and labia majora, the righteous wife-beaters, the stoners of adulterers, the shariah clerics denying women’s petitions for divorce from abusive husbands and awarding sons twice the inheritance allowed for daughters, all act with sanction from Islamic holy writ. It matters not a whit to the bloodied and battered victims of such savagery which lines from the Hadith or what verses from the Koran ordain the violence and injustice perpetrated against them, but one thing they do know: texts and belief in them have real-life consequences. And we should never forget that ISIS henchmen and executioners explicitly cite their faith in Islam as their motive. Tell that to Derrida – or Aslan.

Not just belief in the Koran leads to mayhem, though. Open the Book of Leviticus (in the Hebrew Bible and Old Testament) and read the prescriptions of death (often by stoning or burning) as punishment for, among other things, cursing your parents, committing adultery, practicing bestiality (with mandatory slaughter of the unwitting animal as well), engaging in prostitution or sodomy, worshipping another god or taking God’s name in vain, and being the (female) victim of rape. The New Testament is somewhat less vicious, but even gentle Jesus, meek and mild, warned in Matthew (10:34): “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” and preached “unquenchable fire” and damnation for sinners.

That the faithful have always been acting on the words in their holy books may not accord with how Aslan would like us to see religion, but it is hardly news.

[I]ntentionally trying to obscure cause and effect where faith is concerned, as Aslan does, is morally reprehensible, is insensitive to the victims, and provides cover for their butchers

The problem with religion lies not with, as Aslan would have it, interpretation – postmodern or otherwise – but with, for starters, the founding texts themselves. The canonical writings of Islam, Christianity and Judaism all contain a plethora of macabre fables and explicit injunctions for vile, sadistic behavior that no civilized person would or should accept, but which far too many do take as literal truth.

The so-called “New Atheists,” including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, have tried to do the opposite: get people to examine religion and help them understand it as innately backward, obscurantist, irrational and dangerous. Their aggressive secularism has, of course, stirred controversy and resentment. It was bound to do so. For millennia, the faithful have held the high moral ground virtually unopposed.

Aslan said much more in his interview worthy of refutation, but what transpires through all the rhetorical dodges, whitewashing and clever distortions of fact he (and others defending religion) have offered us since Maher delivered his anti-Islamic monologue is not that one faith is better or less violent than another, but that religion itself is to blame. Religion, in interfering with the free exercise of our critical faculties, in setting out an outlandishly untrue history of the cosmos and humankind’s position in it, and in purporting universality that some are willing to die and kill for, is more than just what the physicist Steven Weinberg called “an insult to human dignity;” it is, in our age of weapons of mass destruction and increasing global instability, a threat to us all.

[R]eligion must be dumped, ushered out of the public arena and back into the private, personal realm for those still inclined to harbor it or too weak to do without it. No thinking person need feel pressured into condoning or excusing faith-based brutalities out of well-meaning but incorrect liberal sentiments.

Nonbelievers need to approach faith as a subject like any other, one we can talk about and criticize without fear of causing offense – or, in the case of Islam, concern for our physical safety.

This is in fact our constitutional right. The First Amendment forbids Congress from establishing an official religion and protects free speech – including speech that offends the sentiments of believers. If we disbelieve what religion’s canon tells us, we need to say so openly, and in mixed company, pointing out that no rational person could believe it or accept it as true and valid, were it not for indoctrination, immaturity, willful abandonment of reason, fear, or simple feeblemindedness.
We can also cease displaying knee-jerk respect for those who propagate faith. 

There's more, but in sum, the piece makes a case that I have tried to make often: religion deserves no deference nor do its adherents regardless of their particular faith.  Logic, reason and intellect should hold the "godly" accountable for their atrocities and daily abuse and discrimination against others. 

Nazi Pope to Resign By Month End

In a surprising but most welcomed move from this blog's perspective the villainous Pope Benedict XVI, a/k/a Pope Palpatine, a/k/a the Nazi Pope will resign effective February 28, 2013.  No Pope has resigned from the papacy in over 600 years.  While citing health and age issues, one cannot help but wonder whether Benedict worries that some new bombshell might be forthcoming from the massive document dump in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles or elsewhere that could seriously damage the Vatican.  For over twenty years as head of the Inquisition, Benedict had his finger prints all over files involving predator priests and may well have ordered their protection and the obstruction of justice.  Obviously, should some possible new explosive expose be forthcoming, it would be a wonderful development in exposing the utter filth that is the Church hierarchy.  Here are details from the Washington Post:

Pope Benedict XVI announced Monday that he would resign Feb. 28 — the first pontiff to do so in nearly 600 years. The decision sets the stage for a conclave to elect a new pope before the end of March.  The 85-year-old pope announced his decision in Latin during a meeting of Vatican cardinals on Monday morning.

He emphasized that carrying out the duties of being pope — the leader of more than a billion Roman Catholics worldwide — requires “both strength of mind and body.”

The last pope to resign was Pope Gregory XII, who stepped down in 1415 in a deal to end the Great Western Schism among competing papal claimants.

Benedict called his choice “a decision of great importance for the life of the church.”

The move sets the stage for the Vatican to hold a conclave to elect a new pope by mid-March, since the traditional mourning time that would follow the death of a pope doesn’t have to be observed.

There are several papal contenders in the wings, but no obvious front-runner — the same situation when Benedict was elected pontiff in 2005 after the death of Pope John Paul II.

Sadly, Benedict and his predecessor, the less than saintly John Paul II worked to stack the college of cardinals with reactionary hacks, so the likelihood of a modernizing Pope being selected is probably remote.

Catholic Bishops Begin to Demand Loyalty Oaths. Is the Nazi Salute Next?

So much for freedom of conscience in a growing number of Roman Catholic dioceses, including the nearby Arlington Diocese that encompasses northern and parts of eastern Virginia.  Even volunteers are being demanded to sign onto a loyalty oath where they submit “of will and intellect” to all of the teachings of church leaders. The Catholic Church has always operated like a feudal dictatorship, but now the bishops and the Vatican want a conformity to their orders and perverted teachings that looks like something out of the Spanish Inquisition.  Given that Benedict XVI ran the modern day Inquisition - that was conveniently renamed to avoid the less than positive connotations of the organization's prior name - for roughly two decades, this development should not come as any surprise.  Of course, the bishops' mandate is that Catholics follow all Church teachings, including the condemnation of gays and contraception.  The move comes to late it would seem since a majority of Catholics approve of same sex marriage and over 90% of Catholic women use contraception.  Hopefully, this move will drive even more Catholics from the Church.  The Washington Post looks at this Inquisition mind set.  Here are highlights:

Last month, Riley joined at least four other Sunday school teachers and resigned from her post at St. Ann’s parish after a letter arrived at her home requiring her — and all teachers in the Arlington Catholic Diocese — to submit “of will and intellect” to all of the teachings of church leaders.

The Arlington Diocese, which includes nearly a half-million Catholics across northern and eastern Virginia, is one of a small but growing number that are starting to demand fidelity oaths. The oaths reflect a churchwide push in recent years to revive orthodoxy that has sharply divided Catholics.

Such oaths are not new for priests or nuns but extend now in some places to people like volunteer Sunday school teachers as well as workers at Catholic hospitals and parish offices.

One in Baker, Ore., reiterates the sinfulness of abortion and says, “I do not recognize the legitimacy of anyone’s claim to a moral right to form their own conscience in this matter.” One in Oakland, Calif., requires leaders of a group doing outreach to gay and lesbian Catholics to say they “affirm and believe” official church teaching on marriage, hell and chastity.

The Arlington “profession of faith” asks teachers to commit to “believe everything” the bishops characterize as divinely revealed, and Arlington’s top doctrine official said it would include things like the bishops’ recent campaign against a White House mandate that most employers offer contraception coverage. Critics consider the mandate a violation of religious freedom.

[F]or some, particularly more liberal Catholics, the oaths are an alarming effort to stamp out debate in the church at a time when it is bleeding members and clergy in the West. They note that church leaders’ views have changed over the centuries on various subjects, including contraception.

“I’m just shocked, I can’t believe they’re asking me to sign this,” said Riley, who said she may keep her own children out of the parish education program in the fall. “The bishops are human, and sometimes their judgment is not God’s judgment.

Zagarri said the oath was a “slap in the face” to Catholics who have remained active and close to the church despite controversies.   .   .   .   . in my view only a person who is willing to abandon her own reason and judgment, or who is willing to go against the dictates of her own conscience, can agree to sign such a document,” she wrote to Arlington Bishop Paul Loverde.

The Rev. Ronald Nuzzi, who heads the leadership program for Catholic educators at the University of Notre Dame, said many bishops “are in a pickle.” They want Catholic institutions to be staffed by people who not only teach what the church teaches but whose “whole life will bear witness.”

Nuzzi said he keeps a photo on his desk from the 1940s that shows all the German bishops in their garb, doing the Nazi salute.  “I keep it there to remind people who say to do everything the Church says, that their wisdom has limitations, too.”

One has to wonder what's next in this totalitarian batshitery: a revival of the auto de fe?  Oh, and does the loyalty oath mean one has to support the enabling of and cover ups for child rapist priests?

Pope Palpatine

A fellow Bilerico Project contributor came across this photo and couldn't help himself and posted it. I couldn't either. It would seem to me at least that there are some similarities between Ratzinger and the fictional Emperor Palpatine - not the least of which is an utter lack of concern for others as typified by the countless children and youth who were allowed to be exposed to serial sexual predators while no one in the Church hierarchy gave a damn, including Ratzinger during his roughly 20 years as head of the Vatican department formerly known as The Inquisition.

Book on Legion of Christ Sex Abuse Scandal to Overshadow Pope's Visit to Mexico

I have long maintained that the Roman Catholic Church sex abuse scandal epitomizes the moral bankruptcy of the Roman Catholic Church's utter moral bankruptcy. However, few of the disgusting vile stories track directly to the Vatican than that of Rev. Marciel Maciel, the Mexican founder of the disgraced Legion of Christ religious order who was a drug addict and pedophile - and a protected favorite of the far less than saintly Pope John Paul II. The story of Marceil is an indictment of both John Paul II and his successor, Benedict XVI who as the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, a/k/a the Inquisition, knew full well about the horrible and tawdry behavior of Marceil. Thankfully, a new book on the sins and sexual abuse of Marceil is being released just in time for Pope Benedict XVI's disingenuous PR trip to Mexico. In my view, Benedict XVI needs to have Marceil hung around his neck. Yes, his apologists will try to shift blame to John Paul II, but Benedict XVI could have done more to stop Marceil and he chose not to do so. Failures to act can be just as damning as acts of malfeasance. Here are some highlights from Huffington Post on what is likely to greet the Nazi Pope:

Pope Benedict XVI arrives in Mexico this week to a very public reminder of one of the Catholic Church's most egregious sex abuse scandals: A new book says internal Vatican documents show the Holy See knew decades ago of allegations that the Mexican founder of the disgraced Legion of Christ religious order was a drug addict and pedophile.

The documentation has been compiled in a book "La voluntad de no saber" ("The will to not know"), which is co-authored by Jose Barba, a former Legion priest who along with other priests in 1998 brought a church trial against the Legion's founder, the Rev. Marciel Maciel, for having sexually abused them while they were seminarians.

While details of the abuse were made public years ago, the new documents seem to solidify proof that the Vatican knew of the allegations long before taking action. Excerpts of the book were published by the Mexican magazine Proceso on Sunday.

"The importance of this book is that it documents the irrefutable evidence and proof that the Vatican has been lying about Maciel," said Bernardo Barranco, an expert from the Religious Studies Center of Mexico and author of the prologue of the new text.

The former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Benedict, headed the office that received their complaint in 1998, but it took the Vatican eight years to sanction Maciel for the crimes, while the accusers were branded as liars and discredited by the Legion.

Maciel, meanwhile, continued to enjoy Pope John Paul II's highest regard as the founder of one of the world's fastest-growing religious orders, able to attract money and vocations to the church despite the mounting accusations against him. . . . . Benedict took over the Legion in 2010 after the order finally admitted Maciel had molested seminarians and fathered three children with two women. A Vatican investigation determined Maciel, who died in 2008, was a religious fraud who had built an order based on silence and obedience that allowed his double life to go unchecked.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Barba said the book was based on information from some 212 documents in a Vatican archive that he said he had obtained from unnamed church officials.

The documentation, he said, demonstrates that the Vatican had information against Maciel as early as 1944 and particularly in the mid-1950s, when the Holy See launched its first investigation into the Mexican-born Maciel. The so-called apostolic visitation lasted from 1956 to 1958, during which time Maciel was suspended as the Legion's superior, though he was subsequently reinstalled.

The documents "show with complete clarity that the Vatican knew the true nature of this man, the accusations, the opinion of experts, the revision of other experts on top of previous experts, and the opinions that the apostolic visitors gave," Barba said.

"The revelation of these documents, previously unknown to the great majority of Legionaries who acted in good faith, shows that there were solid grounds for the removal of Fr. Maciel more than 50 years ago," Gill said in an email, calling anew for the Vatican to further investigate how Maciel could have hidden his behavior from public view for so long.

The Catholic blogger Cassandra Jones, for example, has cited letters sent in 1956 from the bishops of Cuernavaca, Mexico, and Mexico City to the Vatican's office for religious orders recommending Maciel's removal and a Vatican investigation into what Cuernavaca's then-bishop Sergio Mendez Arceo termed "devious and lying behavior, use of narcotic drugs, acts of sodomy with boys of the congregation."

But "La Voluntad de no saber," which comes out on Benedict's first full day in Mexico, promises more complete documentation from the Vatican's own archives. While the book is only being published in Spanish in Mexico with an initial run of 6,000 copies, the documentation will be available on a website, , organizers said. http://www.lavoluntaddenosaber.com

Benedict himself has acknowledged Maciel was a "false prophet" but has insisted that he only learned the true nature of the allegations against Maciel in 2000. His office received Barba's complaint in 1998 and the Vatican's office for religious orders received the Mexican bishops' charges in 1956.

Barba and other victims have said they would never agree to a meeting with Benedict since it was his old office – the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith – that sat on the case for eight years while they suffered the Legion's defamation campaign to discredit them.

"For nothing in the world would I ever meet with someone who protected Maciel when he should have been punished," said Jose Antonio Perez Olvera, a former Legionary who was sexually abused by Maciel. "We don't make deals with criminals, nor with those who were their protectors and accomplices."

Sadly, too many Catholics refuse to admit that the Vatican is a foul criminal enterprise that has protected child rapists on literally a global basis. And if the sex abuse wasn't enough in and of itself to expose the criminality of the Vatican, now it appears that the Vatican Bank may have been laundering money - something that has caused JP Morgan Chase to close accounts with the Vatican Bank. The Daily Beast has coverage on this new banking scandal. Here are some excerpts:

The Vatican is in public-relations panic-mode ... again. But it’s not the pedophile priest scandal or Vatileaks that has the pope’s image-makers hopping. This time the Holy See faces serious allegations that its curious accounting practices are really a cover for a money-laundering scheme.

On March 30, the Milan branch of the global investment bank JPMorgan Chase will officially close the Vatican bank’s account No. 1365—held by the Institute for Works of Religion, or the IOR—on speculation that the account is being used for less-than-immaculate financial deeds. JPMorgan Chase sent a letter to the Vatican on Feb. 15 to notify them of the closure after the Vatican bankers were “unable to respond” to a series of requests about questionable money transfers from the account. The JPMorgan Chase account was a “sweeping facility” that was zeroed out at the end of each business day. The account, which was opened in 2009, had processed some $1.5 billion in funds to other Vatican accounts—mostly in Germany—during the short time it was open, . . . . the fact that Vatican bankers couldn’t quite explain the reason they moved so much money in such a short period of time led the bank to close the account.

Earlier this month, the U.S. State Department named the Holy See on a list of its own, as a “jurisdiction of concern” for money-laundering practices in its annual International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, alongside countries like Honduras and Syria.

“The best way for the Vatican to come clean would of course be to close the bank: it’s hard to see why it’s needed other than to shroud the Church’s financial dealings in a veil of obsessive secrecy,” he [Reuters financial columnist Pierre Briançon] wrote in a recent blog post. “Barring such a radical exorcism, a clean sweep is in order.”

Sexual abuse of children, protecting and covering up for sexual predators and money laundering - what does it take to make rank and file Catholics to open their eyes to the truth about the putrid Church leadership in Rome? If one has a shred of moral decency, I honestly do not understand how they can continue to hand money over the the Catholic Church.

The Inquisition - The Precursor to the Police State

I often note that throughout history, religion has been one of the causes of more deaths and misery than just about any other cause. Yes, there were plagues and pestilence, but deaths arising from conflicts over religion, including the rigid enforcement of religious dogma, have always been elective as opposed to naturally occurring. And but for religion - and the oft related goals of power control and, most of all, money - these deaths need not have occurred.

While wars of religion date back probably to the near dawn of history, one institution took religious reigns of terror to their peak and set the template in many ways for modern police states and totalitarian regimes. The institution likewise justified torture as a supposed furtherance of what was good and "holy." The institution? The Catholic Church's infamous Inquisition. An institution which continues to exist this very day under the name " The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith." Even more frightening, until his election as Pope, Benedict XVI presided over this institution. A piece in the New Humanist based in the United Kingdom looks at the Inquisition and the dangers that arise from religious certitude - a characteristic all too prevalent amongst today's Christianists. The piece also looks at how the Inquisition created the mindset of today's police states. Here are some highlights:

Just inside the gate, at Piazza del Sant’Uffizio 11, stands a Renaissance palazzo with a ruddy ochre-and-cream complexion. This is the headquarters of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, whose job, in the words of the Apostolic Constitution Pastor bonus, promulgated in 1988 by Pope John Paul II, is “to promote and safeguard the doctrine on faith and morals throughout the Catholic world”. Pastor bonus goes on: “For this reason, everything which in any way touches such matter falls within its competence.” It is an expansive charge.

But before the Congregation became the Holy Office, it went by yet another name: as late as 1908, it was known as the Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition. Lenny Bruce once joked that there was only one “the Church”. The Sacred Congregation of the Universal Inquisition was the headquarters of the Inquisition – the centuries-long effort by the Church to deal with its perceived enemies, within and without, by whatever means necessary, including the most brutal ones available.

The palazzo that today houses the Congregation was originally built to lodge the Inquisition when the papacy, in 1542, amid the onslaught of Protestantism and other noxious ideas, decided that the Church’s intermittent and far-flung inquisitorial investigations needed to be brought under some sort of centralised control – a spiritual Department of Homeland Security, as it were. The Inquisition had begun in the Middle Ages, to deal with Christian heresies, and been revived in Iberia, under state control, to deal with Jews and Moors.

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith inherited more than the Inquisition’s DNA and its place on the organisational charts. It also inherited much of the paper trail. The Inquisition records are kept mainly in the palazzo itself . . . .

[C]onsider what an inquisition – any inquisition – really is: a set of disciplinary procedures targeting specific groups, codified in law, organised systematically, enforced by surveillance, exemplified by severity, sustained over time, backed by institutional power and justified by a vision of the one true path. Considered that way, the Inquisition is more accurately seen not as a relic but as a harbinger.

Whatever the number killed, the Inquisition levied penalties on hundreds of thousands of people, and the fear and shame instilled by any individual case rippled outward to affect a wide social circle. Little wonder that the Inquisition has left such a lasting imprint.

Here’s the central question: why did the Inquisition come into being when it did? Intolerance, hatred and suspicion of one group by another had always existed. Throughout history, these realities had led to persecution and violence. But the ability to sustain a persecution – to give it staying power by giving it an institutional life – did not appear until the Middle Ages. Until then, the tools to stoke and manage those embers of hatred did not exist. Once the tools do exist, inquisitions become a fact of life. They are not confined to religion; they are political as well.

The tools are these: there needs to be a system of law, and the means to administer it with a certain amount of uniformity. Techniques must be developed for conducting interrogations and extracting information. Procedures must exist for record-keeping, and for retrieving information after records have been compiled and stored. An administrative mechanism – a bureaucracy – is required, along with a cadre of trained people to staff it. There must be an ability to send messages across significant distances, and also an ability to restrict the communications of others – in a word, censorship.

Interrogation manuals, like the famous Practica written by Bernard Gui, were drawn up to instruct inquisitors on how to question the accused – the tricks to use, the psychology to employ. The resemblance to the modern manuals for military personnel and intelligence operatives is hard to miss. As a supplement to interrogation, torture became systematic – subject to rules, perhaps, but rules that proved elastic, as they always do.

So the tools were new. The precipitating mindset was age-old: the conviction that one is absolutely right. Cardinal Alfredo Ottaviani, the prefect of the Holy Office through most of the 1960s, adopted as his motto the Latin phrase Semper idem – “Always the same”. The inquisitors shared an outlook of moral certainty. In a world of moral certainty, the unthinkable becomes permissible. The sanctity of private conscience is no longer deemed inviolate. Techniques for ensnaring the innocent in scenarios of scripted guilt become increasingly sophisticated.

[T]he desire to control the thoughts and behaviour of others – joined to a belief that God or history will render an approving judgement – underlies much of the sad narrative of the past hundred years: the police states, the dirty wars, the ethnic cleansing, the internments, the renditions, the Red Scares, the fatwas, the special prosecutors, the electronic surveillance, the encroachments accomplished in name of national security.

Persecution acquired a modern platform – the advantages afforded by a growing web of standardised law, communications, administrative supervision and controlled mechanisms of force. It was run not merely by warriors but by an educated elite; not merely by thugs but by skilled professionals. Every subsequent outbreak of persecution, political or religious, has been abetted by these same forces. . . . Through the lens of the Inquisition we can glimpse the world we inhabit now.

When the Inquisition’s palazzo was built, in the mid-16th century, the Pope ordered words to be carved in a marble scroll over the front door – a kind of mission statement – establishing the building as a “bulwark against heretical depravity”. The words are gone now, removed by French troops during Napoleon’s occupation. It’s easy enough to remove some words – harder to erase a legacy.

As noted in previous posts, what is disconcerting is that in the USA, the laws have been amended to reduce civil liberty protections and place more arbitrary power in the hands of the government with little means to hold the government accountable. Were religion to ever become fully entwined with government as is the goal of the Christianists, the outcome could be frightening indeed.

The Pope's War on the Church

As a former Roman Catholic, I will concede that I hold the Church hierarchy in utter contempt. Particularly, because of the manner in which the hierarchy, including Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI, aided, abetted and protected child/youth rapists. Every one of them involved ought to be behind bars for lengthy prison sentences. But Pope John Paul II and Benedict XVI have much more dirt on their hands than just the sexual abuse scandal according to a new book by Matthew Fox, a former Catholic theologian who was ultimately driven from the Church by Benedict XVI, chief inquisitor of the Inquisition under John Paul II. The book is entitled The Pope’s War: Why Ratzinger’s Secret Crusade has Imperiled the Church and How it Can be Saved. Religion Dispatches has an interview with Fox (he doesn't hold his punches) and here are some highlights:
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The Catholic Church is ripe for another reformation. That’s the message theologian Matthew Fox sends in his new book . . . Fox is a former Catholic priest who was silenced by Pope Benedict XVI (who was then Cardinal Ratzinger) after a 12-year-long battle over his writings. The book points to scandals, from the best-known to the unfamiliar, that are rotting the church from the inside out. The current pope, Fox contends, has filled the Church with yes-men (all men, of course), and it's up to the Catholics in the pews to "push the restart button on Christianity."
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I take people through Ratzinger and how he came to be who he is, his childhood and adulthood. I also take people through who I call Ratzinger’s enemies—that would be liberation theology and Creation spirituality—and then Ratzinger’s allies, who are really scary. With allies like that you don’t need enemies—like Opus Dei, the Legion of Christ and Father (Marcial) Maciel,. .
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So there are three scandals here: one of them is pedophilia and its cover up. The second is the financial scandal, and the third, but by no means the least, is this intellectual/political destruction of theology.
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I think John Paul II was given a teflon papacy. He appointed Ratzinger as his chief inquisitor. He brought the Inquisition back. Everything Ratzinger did was supported by John Paul II, including his ugly documents about gays. He wrote two of them when he was chief inquisitor and one since he’s been pope and each one of them is uglier than the other, and meaner. This was signed off on by John Paul II.
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Also, John Paul II stood by while all this pedophile stuff was going on, including his close friend Father Maciel who he took on airplanes with him. That’s how close they were. He was utterly passive. . . . John Paul II did nothing. His hands are not nearly as clean as some people would like to imagine.
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John Paul II is the one who linked up with Opus Dei and Communion and Liberation, which is another far-far-right wing movement in Italy. They canonized (Josemaria) Escriva, the founder of Opus Dei, and Escriva actually praised Hitler. He was a card-carrying fascist. Now, they’ve appointed all these Opus Dei and fascist bishops and cardinals all over Latin America to replace liberation theology. We should not be naïve about either of these popes.

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[T]he Vatican in its present state is beyond redemption. I think it is a very closed boy’s club. I have a section in the book on bullying. Ratzinger is a bully. I know him. He was in a 12-year battle with me before he won, I guess, and expelled me. Part of bullying, according to the studies that I’ve found, is that the bully likes a wolf pack. That wolf pack is the Curia (the central governing body of the Roman Catholic Church).
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The point I make in the book is that the laypeople have to take over the church, period. It’s not going to be reformed from the inside, or from the top down, at all. It’s rancid, and so, these people have to assert themselves and that’s the next step, for laypeople to realize it’s their church. They should only hire ministers who are willing to serve and not to be served, and that means starting over.

Priest Who Says Being Gay is Normal Banned from Writing

Conservative - and some might argue, demented - Christians are continuing their rear guard effort of trying to stop the spreading acceptance of the fact that homosexuality is a natural occurring phenomenon in nature. The anti-modernity crowd likewise refuse to accept that all of the LEGITIMATE medical and mental health experts (i.e., those not funded by wingnut organizations) have concluded that sexual orientation is not something that is a choice or that can be changed. A new example of this ultimately losing battle is the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican (known as the Inquisition in past centuries) command that a priest who accepts modern knowledge no longer be allowed to publish any of his writings. The move echos that of Benedict XVI's predecessors who tried to silence those who said the earth was round and not flat and did likewise to those who said the earth orbited the sun rather than vice versa. One would think that given Church's centuries long record of being incredibly wrong on so many things, the Nazi Pope and his minions would have perhaps learned something. But such is not the case. This latest target of the Vatican's anti-modernity and anti-knowledge wrath is Capuchin priest Fr. Owen O’Sullivan who had the timidity to write that same-sex attraction is simply a facet of the human condition. Here are highlights from the Irish Times:
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AN IRISH Catholic priest has been banned by the Vatican from publishing any more of his writings after he suggested homosexuality is “simply a facet of the human condition”.
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This follows an article on homosexuality by Capuchin priest Fr Owen O’Sullivan, published in last March’s edition of the Furrow magazine. Described as “a journal for the contemporary Church”, the Furrow is published at St Patrick’s College Maynooth.
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Throughout history “same-sex attraction and acts have been a consistent feature of human life . . . Same-sex attraction is simply a facet of the human condition,” he said. He recalled church teaching says it is not wrong to be gay, ‘‘but it is wrong to act gay”. He suggested: “Imagine someone saying... ‘There’s nothing in itself wrong with being Irish... But that doesn’t mean you may act on it. So, no more Guinness, going to Croke Park, singing rebel songs into the early hours of the morning, waving Tricolours, no more craic.”
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The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith at the Vatican contacted the Capuchin secretary general in Rome with an instruction Fr O’Sullivan was no longer to write for publication without first having his articles approved by it.
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Capuchin headquarters in Rome contacted Fr O’Sullivan’s superiors. Contacted by The Irish Times , Fr O’Sullivan did not feel free to discuss it nor did Fr Ronan Drury, editor of the Furrow .
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The Catholic Church is losing membership all over the educated areas of the world. Idiocy like this situation will only serve to accelerate the Church's decline in the developed world (perhaps not a bad thing) and ultimately leave Catholicism as a religion of the ignorant and uneducated.

Clarence Thomas' Growing Conflict of Interest Problems

I have written a couple of articles of late on the unprecedented and highly questionable activities of Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Not only is Thomas' wife apparently reaping financial gain from anonymous donors, but her ties to ultra far right organizations make it increasingly impossible for Thomas to retain any semblance of impartiality on any number of cases and issues coming before the Supreme Court. In my opinion, Ms. Thomas needs to either cease and desist in her activities or Justice Thomas needs to consider resigning from the Supreme Court. Besides raising the obvious conflict of interest issues, Virginia Thomas' activities and allegiances also raise questions as to her sanity. Case in point, her allegiance with a Catholic organization that believes that The Spanish Inquisition was a high point for Roman Catholicism. Torture, murder, driving people from their homes - all hallmarks of the Inquisition - yet Ms. Thomas allies herself with those who support such activities. Here are highlights from Alternet:
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Mrs. Thomas' Tea Party think tank, Liberty Central, promotes the causes of groups that take pride in intolerance, including one right-wing Catholic group, Tradition, Family and Property, whose founder declared the Spanish Inquisition "the most beautiful page in the history of the Church."
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Earlier this year, AlterNet reported on Liberty Central's embrace of Gun Owners of America, whose president, Larry Pratt -- guru to the militia movement -- unapologetically addressed a rally of white supremacists in 1992, and more recently told attendees of a gun owners' rally in Washington, D.C., that they are "at war" with the federal government. We also looked at Liberty Central's relationship with the Missouri Sovereignty Project, which threatens armed insurrection against the government.
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Since then, Thomas has added to the "Friends of Liberty Central" page on her think tank's Web site a plug for Tradition, Family and Property, a virulently anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-democratic Catholic group founded in 1960.
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TFP has long enjoyed ties to the far right in American politics, including the International Freedom Foundation, which existed primarily as an American front group for the apartheid regime in South Africa during the Reagan years,
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[The founder of TFP] loved the Spanish Inquisition, he wrote, "because, while it went on, the Catholic Church managed to cleanse itself of heretics." (Never mind that many of those so-called heretics were Jews who wanted nothing more than to practice their own faith, or people whose politics were inconvenient to the Spanish throne.)
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The Catholic crusades against the Muslim world are viewed as a time of glory by the devotees of TFP. Roberto de Mattei, who wrote a friendly biography of Oliveira and is said to be close to TFP, presented his revisionist history of the crusades at a 2006 conference at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University in Rome.

Forgiving the Unforgivable

This cartoon says it all in my view - both about the lawless Bush/Cheney regime which fomented the use of torture and also about clerics both past and present who likewise urge followers to do heinous and unforgivable acts all in the name of God. (Note: click on image for larger view)